Pimp Your Crosley!

 

Previously: In Praise of Cheap Record Players

 In my last entry I sang the praises of the Crosley Cruiser Deluxe record player (suitcase style) as being   a pretty decent device for anyone who, like me, just   wants something to play records on without spending   a fortune on a more expensive system. 

Although the sound you get from a Crosley is more than adequate, due to its modest size and small speakers, the sound is going to fall somewhere short of fantastic. 

So today we'll talk about how you can get much, much better sound out of this simple record player.  And we'll try to show you how to do it on the cheap.

But first things first. If you happen to be a product of the last two generations, you may never have held an actual record in your hand, let alone played one on one of those ancient devices we old-timers used to call a turntable.  Therefore I'm not going to assume anything about your level of knowledge. I'll start at the beginning.  Better yet, allow me to turn the time over to one of the internet's most popular experts on records and record players, Mr. Record-ology, who will tell you everything you need to know to start playing your own records on your very own record player. Best of all, Mr. Record-ology will be demonstrating on a Victrola suitcase style record player, which is virtually identical to the Crosley Cruiser I own, right down to the color of the case.

Why does the record player in the video look identical to the one I showed you in my previous post?  Well, here on the lower end of the turntable spectrum you may notice several brands whose insides, (the turntable and tonearm assemblies) are virtually identical.  That's because their innards are pretty much the same. The various models may have been designed and assembled by American or British companies, but the mechanical parts were likely manufactured overseas -and maybe even at the same factory.  (This is likely to be true of even higher-end turntables these days.)

The only real difference is the price: some of these so-called "cheaper" designs actually cost way more

than others.  These entry-level record players are often referred to as "Crosley-style" record players, since Crosley, a company that has been making these things for over a hundred years, is the leader in the field.  What all these makes and models have in common is that identical red stylus you see here. It doesn't matter what brand.  If your record player came with this familiar red stylus, that's how you know you have a Crosley Cruiser type record player.

So, let's get started. Here's Mr. Record-ology to teach you everything you need to know:

If the video fails to load, CLICK HERE to watch it on Youtube.  But don't forget to come back!

Before we go any further, I should point out that the suitcase player you see in the upper left corner of this page is not a Crosley.  This one is a brand I never heard of, but as you can see, it has the same basic innards as my Crosley and the Victrola demonstrated in the video. I like the design of this suitcase player because what it has going for it is the kitch factor -it's a suitcase record player that actually looks like a suitcase. 

Unfortunately, this brand, the ClearClick Vintage Suitcase Turntable, is priced at over twice the cost of my Crosley Cruiser, so I won't be buying one of these.  Kitch is cool, but if I bought this I'd be paying all that extra money just for the way the exterior looks.  It's still basically the same record player on the inside as the one I already have. Compare and see for yourself:

Besides, if I had money to burn what I would really go for is the Studebaker. The Kitcsh factor on this one is off the charts!

It should be noted that the one and only review on Amazon for the Studebaker record player is a negative one.  The buyer claims the unit he received didn't work at all, so he returned it for another.  Then he says that one didn't work either.

As for me, I wouldn't have cared. This thing would be amazing if all it did was sit on the shelf and look cool. Unfortunately, the Studebaker is priced at $129.88 on Amazon, which makes it a rather expensive knick knack. So I'll be making do with what I have, a Crosley Cruiser Deluxe which, last time I looked, currently retails at Walmart for 46 bucks. (As I mentioned last month, the Cruiser I bought at a yard sale cost me one fourth the retail price, which at the time, I think was around $39.00. So Booyah! I'm still winning.) 

I should also note here that if you're inclined to run out and buy a Crosley Cruiser or equivalent, don't buy the exact model I own.  I own the Crosley Cruiser Deluxe.  What you Want is its successor, the Crosley Cruiser Plus.  When Crosley put out the Cruiser Deluxe they included an option that would allow users to connect a device such as a phone through their record player so buyers could hear music through the Crosley's speakers.  Turns out nobody really wanted that.  What buyers really wanted was to be able to cast the sound from the record player out to an external bluetooth speaker.  So the Crosley people put that capability into the next iteration of the record player, the  Crosley Cruiser Plus.  If you have the unit with that kind of bluetooth capability you've already gone a long way toward pimping out your Crosley because now the sound quality is pretty much limited only by how good the quality is on your Bluetooth speakers.

And this brings us finally to the topic at hand: how do we make an entry-level record player sound a whole lot better than it does right out of the box?  

The Answer Is In Stereo Separation

I must be missing something because most Bluetooth speakers I've seen in the stores and online are one piece units that lack stereo separation. Sure, most of these bluetooh speakers appear to have two speakers built in, but who wants that? What you want is two separate speakers you can arrange so that you have left channel sound firing into your left ear and right channel sound in your right ear. Apparently if you want a decent set of two separate stereo Bluetooth speakers you'll have to pay well over a hundred dollars each for them. So let's put Bluetooth aside for now and go old-school, which means we'll be abiding by The Hipster's Code and heading out to the thrift stores.  That's where we're likely to find real 1970s style bookshelf speakers like in the olden days: the kind with wires trailing out the back.

Now, I should reiterate here what I wrote in my previous post about headphones, and that's this: headphones are my favorite way of hearing music in stereo. When I originally went trolling the thriftstores in my new hometown of Sandpoint, Idaho, I found a set of headphones at Goodwill that looked brand new and only cost me a few dollars. When I got them home and tried them out on the Crosley, the improvement in sound was like night and day. As I've written previously, the sound coming through the Crosley's built-in speakers is more than adequate, but with these headphones everything was so much louder, clearer, and brighter. I figured I must have scored an amazing deal on an exceptional pair of headphones with these puppies, so I looked up the model number on the internet (Sony MDR-ZX110) and learned these things were actually pretty ordinary priced as headphones go, at only $19.99 on Amazon. Here are the specs from the Amazon page:

• The wide frequency range—spanning 12 Hz to 22 kHz—delivers deep bass, rich midrange, and soaring highs. Hear the detail in every track, and stay in tune with all your music.
• Enfolding closed-back design seals in sound: The closed-back, enfolding design wraps around the ear, sealing in music and keeping out distractions. Acoustics are reflected back toward your ears, so you hear even the subtlest sounds. You also feel every beat, as the closed-back design maximizes the bass signatures in your music.                                                                                                                                           
None of that was an exaggeration. My grandson Nate and I were testing out the Crosley on the living room floor, sitting cross legged like teenagers in the '50s, but after a while I wanted to sit on the couch like a grownup.  Sadly, the cord on these headphones isn't long enough to be comfortable. So I rummaged around in my bin of cords and cables until I found a ten foot extension cord that would reach from the Crosley to the couch. I like stereo speakers as much as any other baby boomer, but these days I prefer headphones because of the nuanced detail you can't always get with external speakers. In short, Headphones are really all I need when I'm listening to records. But we do have an inexpensive Crosley Cruiser on our hands and if we're gonna pimp this puppy out, we're still going to have to thrift some decent bookshelf speakers. So off we went, Nate and I, to a thrift store run by the local animal shelter.

And......GOLD MINE!  There were plenty of speakers at this location from small computer desktop sizes to bookshelf speakers over a foot tall.  I scored these 9 by 15 inch babies in like-new condition, and paid only six dollars for the pair:
   

Okay, so let's imagine you've also nabbed a boss pair of speakers of your own.  Ready to get your groove on? Well, no, because we're not done yet. Although your Crosley Cruiser has a built-in pre-amplifier, it probably won't have enough power to send  the music from the turntable out to your speakers.  You're still going to have to shell out for an amplifier.  An amplifier does just what you would think it does: it amplifies the sound so it can be heard.  Makes it louder, clearer, and sharper in other words, so your music better fills the room.

The good news is you might be able to thrift a nice used amp.  The even better news is an amp that will power speakers like these can be found brand new online for less than twenty bucks.

If you're lucky enough to find any kind of stereo amplifier at a thrift store, then by all means grab it while you can, because America is crawling with newbie vinyl afficionados hoping to pounce on the same electronic treasures you are on the lookout for.  If you happen to  come across an entire stereo system at a thrift store you've hit the mother lode.  Although it's rare to find stereo components at thrift stores these days, it's not unheard of.  Baby boomers are now dying off at the rate of over five thousand cantankerous souls every day, and some of those boomers have ungrateful kids who are dumping their parents' stuff at thrift stores.

So you never know, it's a matter of being in the right place at the right time. You just have get to those treasures before some punk wannabe audiophile sees them first.

The alternative is to buy a new amplifier online.   I happen to already have a small amp similar to this one you can find on Amazon for $17.99:

This amp doesn't have all the bells and whistles, and mine can only handle 20 watts for each channel, but that's plenty good enough for these speakers.  As you can see, you can adjust bass and treble while your music is playing, so that's awesome.  What it doesn't have is a headphone jack, or something like 200 watts of power, so if you find you really like playing records and you're thinking of ever going full-out and replacing your Crosley with a higher-end turntable, you might be better off spending forty or fifty dollars on a stereo amp that can handle more sound, like this one, for instance:

This Pyle amplifier has more than you'll need for your Crosley, including apparently the capability of letting you plug in two microphones for singing karaoke.  It includes bass, treble, and balance knobs and, most important to me, a headphone jack.  With a headphone jack you won't even have to be near your record player; you can control everything from your amp. The primary reason you will need a good amplifier if you're ever going to buy a better turntable is because a turntable is useless, per se.  A standalone turntable will not let you hear anything through your speakers unless you first hook it up to an amplifier. Without an amplifier that music stays on the record and never reaches your ears.

Of course, you could purchase powered speakers, which essentially means the amplifier is built into the speakers themselves, so your music goes directly from your turntable to the speakers.  But those tend to be expensive and they deprive you of the versatility you get from controlling everything through your amp. Plus with an amp you can upgrade your speakers as often as you wish rather than being at the mercy of one set of powered speakers.  

One more thing to remember: when searching for an amplifier on Amazon or Ebay, regardless of whether you're looking for a cheap and simple amplifier or a more expensive, high wattage one, you will come across lots of preamplifiers listed.  Be careful; you don't want one of those.  The Crosley already has a preamplifier, which is made to power the sound to its built-in speakers.  If you hook up another preamplier you'll just confuse your machine and it won't work.  What you want is called an amplifier, plain and simple.  So nix on the preamp, yes on the amp.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's finish pimping out that Crosley, shall we?  So you've got your speakers and your minimalist amplifier.  Now all you need to do is hook everything together and you're done.  So now you'll need stereo cables, more properly known as RCA  Audio Cables and they look like this.  Your local thrift store probably has dozens of them on hand, or you can find them at amazon:

I recommend buying the longest cables you can afford.  These are listed at 12 feet long at only $6.97, so they should do the trick.  But let's put those aside for now because first we're going to hook the speakers to the amplifier using the wires that are attached to the speakers.  These RCA cables will come after we do that.

Adding the Speakers
So here we go. The back of your amplifier will look something like this:

The speakers you thrifted should have generously long wires coming out the back and splitting at the end into two wires.  Those wires are usually red and black.  Each speaker will have a pair of its own. See where it says "R" and "L" just above those tabs?  What you're going to do is take one of the wires from the speaker you wish to have channel the Right speaker, push down the tab under the "R" (it may also have a + sign as in the photo above), and feed the bare end of the red wire into the red slot.  Then release the tab and that locks the wire in place. 

Now, you still have a black wire attached like a siamese twin to the same wire you just inserted (this same wire pairing is attached on the other end to the same speaker).  Do the same thing with the bare end of this black wire, putting the black wire into the black R (-) slot next to the red one.  Then release that tab to secure the black wire in place.

Good for you! You have now hooked up one speaker.  You just have one more speaker to go, so do the same with the wire coming out of the other speaker, this time putting them in the "Left" channel slot, black in the black (-) slot and red in the red (-).  This is how your system will know how to make the music come out properly in stereo. Don't worry if the speaker itself isn't marked Left or Right. You are the one who makes that decision based upon which speaker you want to be on the left or on the right.  I used a magic marker on the back of these Sonys to mark R and L just so I wouldn't forget which is which. It helps to keep them straight when I'm ready to arrange them, but you don't have to. 

If you scroll up to the picture above where I showed you my Sony speakers, you'll notice there is no red wire.  No problem.  For some crazy reason not all wires come in red and black, but they will have some kind of identifying features so you can tell one from the other.  In the case of these Sony wires, one of the wires is black and the other is a slightly lighter gray with an even lighter stripe along the entire length.  If that's similar to what you have, consider the lighter wire to be "Red" and make that be the wire that goes in the red slot.  

Here is what speaker wire generally (but not always) looks like:

As you can see, each strand is coated all the way up until the end; the bare end is what you will feed into the slot.  In this picture one wire is red and the other is clear.  I've seen some wires where one is clear and the other is blue.  The only thing that matters is that on each channel, you put the "black" one in the black slot and the "Red" (or whatever it is) in the red slot on each side so they are the same on both the R and the L sides.  Red to Red and Black to Black, or whatever different colored wires the universe has seen fit to bestow upon you. 

And don't worry if you get one of the wires wrong; nothing is going to explode.  It just isn't going to sound right, is all.  In that case you'll just go back and set things right.

The wire ends are usually copper as in the picture above, but not always.  If the wire ends are all screwed up and you want a fresh new half inch or so at the end, feel free to strip the end off, clip the old bit of wire and start with a newer looking piece.  If you have wire strippers, that works best, but you can also gouge your thumbnail in there and peel it off.  Or use a knife or anything else at hand. That vinyl or rubber (or whatever it is) coating is fairly soft.  Often your fingernail can cut right into it.

Also a good thing to remember: most thrift stores these days will give you a a couple of weeks or so to return electronic equipment if it isn't working, so ask them if that is their policy and by all means listen to what your father taught you and save the receipt.

Almost Done!

Now that you have the speakers hooked up to the amplifier, the only thing left to do is hook the amplifier up to your record player.  See the back of that little amplifier again? Take those RCA cables and plug them into those round pluggy things, the white plug into the white hole and the red plug into the red hole.  In electronic parlance we refer to these things as "male" and "female" plugs and outlets, but not everyone is familiar with that terminolgy.  True Story: back in the early 1980s I managed a Radio Shack store in Salt Lake City when a young girl of about 17 came in to ask for some part or another that she wasn't sure about.  I asked her if she needed a male or female plug.  She didn't know what I meant, so I demonstrated to her with some parts on hand, showing her how the male piece fit right into the female.  For some reason she turned all read and then ran crying out to the car and told her mother on me.  (Her mom came into the store  and thought it was hilarious, by the way). 

So anyhoo.  Take the other end of the RCA cable and plug the red male into the red female and the white male into the white female.  And stop that sniggering. What are you, a child?

Now you're done!  Turn both the amplifier and the record player on and bask in that blast of sheer, loud, stereo enjoyment.  But don't forget to turn the volume down on the record player because now your sound is controlled by the volume knob on the amplifier.  And if you have a fancy amplifier that has a headphone jack, you can plug your headphones (male) directly into the amplifier jack (female - so I guess it's a Jaqueline).  When your headphone jack is in use, the sound will no longer come from your speakers; just your headphones.

And there you are.  Now, if you want to go further there are a couple more things you can do to improve your listening experience.  You can upgrade your ceramic sapphire stylus with a diamond stylus which is far superior than the needle your record player comes with.  This one from TurntableNeedles.com will run you $25.00, and though there are cheaper diamond needles available, many are not that dependable.  This one, the 793-DEM, will give you the best groove contact and increased sound quality available.  One thing is for sure: a diamond needle will last a lot longer than the ceramic needle your record player came with. 

You can also get much better sound quality on 78 rpm records by temporarily replacing the existing stylus with one that is specifically designed for playing 78 records. When you're playing 45s and 33s, the standard LP needle scoots happily along in an imperceptibly tiny groove only1 milliliter wide, while a 78 record has grooves 3 times as wide as that.  What this means is that when you play a 78 using the needle that came with your Crosley, you're not getting the full sound as the needle tries to negotiates those grooves.  The needle doesn't get the chance to follow the curves properly, it just sinks right down to the bottom of the track and scrapes along at the bottom, causing you to often miss the full sound of the record.  On the other hand, a needle that was designed to be played on 78 records actually tracks along both walls of the groove as well as tracking along the bottom, so you get to hear everything that was recorded onto the disc. 

Of course, it would be a nuisance to take your stylus on and off if you're constantly alternating between playing 45s and 33s on the one hand and 78s on the other, but it might be worth it to dedicate a block of time with your record player where you only play 78s maybe for a day.  That way you only have to take your regular stylus off and swap it with the 78 version once in awhile.  Alternatively you can shop around on the internet for a "flip" stylus which will allow you to play both kinds of records just by flipping the needle from LP to 78. You may have to do some digging to find a crosley style 78 flip stylus, but they do exist. Search for the reviews, because one particular brand of 78 flip stylus is said to be not actually the proper width.

The nice thing about pimping your Crosley is this: if you ever decide to upgrade to a better turntable, now you already have the amplifier and you already have the speakers.  Get yourself a high-end turntable and voila! Now you're an audiophile.

Just try not to be the insufferable kind. 

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